---
title: Storing Lightroom Presets with your Catalog
date: 2008-11-30
layout: post
categories:
- Blog
- Lightroom
tags: []
comments: true
---

![image](/blog_images/image_12.png) If you are like me, and rebuild your computer every few months.  Then reconfiguring all your Lightroom Presets can become a pain.  I have done this several times now, and each time before I rebuild my machine I always forget to backup my preset folders.  By default Lightroom stores all your presets under the AppData folder on Vista, specifically _C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\AdobeLightroom_.  On the Mac I believe they are stored at _~/Library/Application Support/Lightroom_, but someone with Mac experience will need to correct me.
###Moving Presets to your Lightroom Catalog###
There is this nice little feature in Lightroom that changes where your presets are stored to the location where your LR Catalog is stored.  This will work out much better for how I work, since I have yet to forget to backup my catalog when I setout to rebuild my machine.  My catalog is stored under my documents directory, specifically at: _C:\Users\USERNAME\Documents\LR_.  Which is a pretty easy location to find and backup.
####Changing the default location####

1. Open Lightroom
2. From the Menu select Edit &gt; Preferences
3. Select the Presets Tab ![image_2](/blog_images/image_2.png)
4. Within the Location area, select "Store presets with catalog" ![image_10](/blog_images/image_10.png)
5. Select OK to exit the Preferences dialog

If you check the folders where you catalog is stored, you will now have a new folder called __Lightroom Settings__. 

![image_thumb2](/blog_images/image_thumb_2.png)

####Move Existing Presets####
There are a couple of additional steps if you already have Presets configured within Lightroom.  Since it seems that selecting "Store presents with catalog" does not move your existing presets to the new location.  So the quickest way I found to move my existing presets is to open the old present location (remember the nasty AppData path) and copy the contents of the Lightroom folder to your new <strong>Lightroom Settings</strong> location.

From this point on you can easily add new presets to Lightroom using your catalog location.
